In any case, if on such interested and doubtful depositions it be admitted that Fouquet’s friends were the counsellors and accomplices of a crime,[465] I can understand that, struck with the coincidence,--not precisely exact, as we have just seen--between these accusations and the Surintendant’s death, the suspicion might arise that the latter was not a natural one. M. Pierre Clement, in his work, _La Police sous Louis XIV._, has expressed this idea with extreme circumspection, and has contented himself with uttering a doubt. He accuses no one, as he is especially careful to declare. But he observes that the period at which Fouquet’s death occurred rendered it an untoward[466] event. He succumbed to an attack of apoplexy, and the nature of this complaint would go far to accredit the theory of poison; but there conjectures ought to stop. Let people hesitate to believe that he was really seized with an attack of this nature: I can conceive their doing so, although numerous reasons combine to make us place credence in it. But everything is entirely opposed to the hypothesis of his death[467] being simulated by Louis XIV.’s orders; and whether it was natural, or whether it was hastened by a crime, it is unquestionably true that it really took place in the month of March of the year 1680. Was it, in truth, a man in a good state of health who suddenly succumbed? It was an old man, who had been ailing for the last sixteen years--a man unsettled by excess of blood[468]--a man whom the absence of every kind of exercise had rendered plethoric, and who, from a busy life and one given up for a long time to pleasure, had suddenly passed to the privations and the inaction of captivity. Was it a prisoner, malignant and full of strong resentment, who was suspected of having instigated his friends to poison Colbert? No, indeed. It was the most patient and the most resigned of captives, who had expiated his faults by the most admirable behaviour, who had pardoned his enemies, and whose mind, detached from the good things of the world, was raised to the contemplation of things divine, and who, offering his own life as an example, had devoted his long leisure to erecting a monument of his piety for the edification of his fellow-creatures. Did he die mysteriously, without witnesses, save a gaoler capable of a crime? It was in the presence of the Count de Vaux, his son, and of his daughter,[469]--it was in their arms that he yielded up his breath. Saint-Mars, whom all his contemporaries represent to us as a perfectly upright man, was the sole intermediary between the King and his prisoners. Lastly, when the news of his death arrives at the court, Louis XIV. immediately causes an order to be transmitted to his representatives at Pignerol “to give up Fouquet’s corpse to his family, in order that they may have it transported whither it may seem good to them.”[470]